Thursday, July 17, 2008

His ears must have been burning

My hubby must have known I was bad mouthing him this morning because he called me within minutes of my bitching to a friend/co-worker and now I am feeling shameful.

Back story is that my MIL called me the other night to invite me to go to Hermann, MO's Stone Hill Winery with her, FIL and another couple on August 9th. When we were in Chicago, we were talking about how much fun we had the last, and only, time we'd been there, back in the Spring of 1992 (not married quite a year to her son). So the opportunity came up and she instantly thought to invite me. Well the problem, if you want to call it that, was that hubby works Saturdays and I needed to figure out child care for our girl. I knew this but when I told hubs about the invite, he snarkily says to me, "You know I work on Saturdays so who are YOU going to get to watch the kid?" I, of course, told him to not worry about it because I'd figure out something. I always do. 'Cause you know that is MY job. I figured I ask my parents. It would be sucky for the girl because it would mean I'd have to get her up at the ass crack of dawn to take over their house but if that's what I had to do, so be it. I was planning on asking my mom today or tomorrow about it.

The reason I'm feeling shameful - he called me to tell me that he put in for a vacation day so I could go! He said it was time for him and the girl to have a daddy/girl day together. I hadn't asked him to take a vacation day because he usually gives me grief when I ask him to change his schedule for me. I know I gripe about him a lot and sometimes it seems like all I have to say about him is negative, but it's little things like this that reminds me why I'm still married to him after 17 years. I really am lucky. Of course, in his usual pervy fashion, tells me that I can pay him back by letting him bring another woman to our bed so she can be the menage to our trois. The ass! LOL!

Daddy & his girl
Zoo2

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

So What Have You Read

Please forgive me for stealing this from a favorite blogger of mine. The Big Read (a program of the National Endowment for the Arts) guesses that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books on this list. I really do love to read and I thought found it interesting just how many I've read and/or started/in progress. The majority of the classics I've read, I owe to my 11th and 12th grade English Literature class teacher, Mrs. Rita Weiss.


1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I'm including any books I've started but haven't finished.)
3) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma- Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (en francais)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Thursday, July 10, 2008

I need to take up a hobby

For all the internal bitching I do about needing some alone time with the hub, I'm missing my girl terribly. I need a hobby. One that I can stick to. There is just 2 more days and she'll be home. The child free week has NOT been sex filled. In fact, Mother Nature showed up on July 4th. Since she left town, we've hooked up twice. Oh well, at least we got to do it in our bed without the fear of getting caught. Yes, even though our girl is 11 and knows that mommies and daddies have sex, she does her darnedest to keep her parents from enjoying each other.

Also, this week has just been absolutely awful on my sinuses. I've had a nagging sinus headache every.flippin.single.day. I'm so sick of it! I can't take the OTC sinus medications because of my high blood pressure. As one of my doctors said, I have to just deal with it. All I can say is that thank the good Lord above that I've been pretty immune to colds for the last 7 years or so because that Coricidin HBP stuff they have out there on the market doesn't do shit! I tried it once for what I thought was a cold, turned out to be allergies, and it did nothing for me.

Oh well, life will turned back to normal come Saturday afternoon. When I start complaining about my drama queen again, remind me of this post, will ya?

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Child-free Week

This Saturday G leaves for 7 nights, 8 days with the ILs for their annual Lake of the Ozarks trip. Woo hoo! This is the longest time she will be away from us since she was 2 1/2 when we went to Puerta Vallerta.

You know what this means don't you? D and I will actually get to enjoy our "alone" time in our bed instead of the living room floor. And there is potential to make it last longer than 10-15 minutes because we aren't having to worry about her walking in on us. We also will get to catch up on watching all the inappropriate movies that she can't watch AND go to a couple of restaurants that she doesn't like because she is such a picky eater.

She told me last night she was getting nervous about being gone for so long away from us. That trip we went on when she was 2 1/2? Well, let's just say we had some abandonment issues with her that took us almost a year to figure out why she wouldn't stay overnight with grandparents or her Aunt Di Di anymore. That lasted until she was around 5 and then we had a relapse again at age 9. She went on an overnight school field trip without me and she got freaked out. She still won't go spend overnight at friend's houses and only has stayed overnight at ILs house twice since that time. Well, I assured her she was going to be fine because she was going with grandma and grandpa, who would spoil her and she was going to get to swim everyday, etc. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that she doesn't get too homesick. I don't think she will but my girl has a tendency to over think things before they happen and worry about potential bad things and then she gets a pleasant surprise when it didn't turn out as bad as she thought. Up until it happens, she drives me bat shit crazy about it!

So the husband and I get to relive the days of what it was like before we had a kid. While I'm looking forward to the break, I know that I'll miss my smart-mouth, drama queen, baby girl.